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Yahoo Mail Popular With Fraudsters
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2006-07-18
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Early Warning, a British company that specializes in "preventing CNP card fraud," has compiled a "list of top ten email addresses used by online card fraudsters." Bad news for people hoping to tighten up their spam filter - they're all services that are pretty common. Gmail managed to stay off the list, but Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and MSN are all present.
The Early Warning report explains that the company's "unique database of fraudsters now runs to tens of thousands of entries." Their results, listed below, came from studying data from the last three years.
1. Yahoo.com
2. Yahoo.co.uk
3. Hotmail.com
4. AOL.com
5. Hotmail.co.uk
6. Parrot.com
7. Postmaster.com
8. Lycos.co.uk
9. Lycos.com
10. Msn.com
This list could be discouraging for Yahoo, especially in light of the comments of Moira Powley, the director of theprinterdatabase.com. According to Early Warning, she asked, "Do you Yahoo? Well, if you do, then I'm afraid we will assume you are a fraudster! Why? Because the majority of fraudulent attempts to buy online using a stolen identity have Yahoo! free email addresses. So, when we see Fred.Bloggs@yahoo.co.uk, we assume it is fraud."
But maybe things will get better, right? Well, Andrew Goodwill, Early Warning's MD, had an experience that made him less optimistic. "In the light of the findings, I contacted Hotmail's legal department in the UK. I suggested that once we had identified email addresses belonging to Hotmail that had been used to commit online credit card fraud, we would be willing to disclose this information automatically to them, so they could block the offending accounts immediately. They declined our offer, saying that they ‘only co-operate with the police' in these matters."
Goodwill did say what he thought was wrong with the current system, and how the problem might be addressed. "I strongly believe the verification process undertaken once a free e-mail address is set up is totally inadequate and allows criminals to continue their illegal acts. We should be putting pressure on these e-mail companies to clean up their acts and take responsibility for what their customers do."
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About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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